mateus.info

Well, it was about time to separate things. From now on, my technical topics blog will be at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/velloso/ while this one will remain as my personal one. Will be posting stuff soon.

Connected Systems User Group had a great first meeting at Microsoft with Ron Jacobs presenting REST. But what was a great surprise (at least for me) was finding out that 20% of the people there were Brazilians!

 Was a nice presentation about how to couple REST and WCF. Cool stuff.

Finally, Zune 2.5 is released. The limitations I was struggling with, like not having smart playlists are over

 www.zune.net

Here I am, back to NZ. Had a great, great time at Microsoft Services University. Here’s a picture that I’m using as my desktop background:

MSSU group photo

With friends from MCS worldwide:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38fbQJt0GLs

Automatic page repair:  You have a mirrored database, and then a single page file fails. SQL Server will automatically recognize that and obtain the copy from the mirror one. Yes, I saw that working.

                Compressed backup. This can make a 77MB backup turn into a 19MB backup. And can make the backup finish in half of the time. But the best thing is that the restore process is faster too.

                Compressed log shipping

                Transparent encryption

                You can add new CPU’s to your server on the fly

                Data auditing

                Declarative management framework: You can configure things like: It is not allowed to have objects under the dbo schema and things just happen. You have a nice console to check if there is any violated rule.

                Row Level Compression and Page Level/Dictionary compression. Imagine you have a varchar column that in 80% of the case is “New Zealand”. That could be stored only once! Cool, eh?

                Resource governor. You can set things like: Connections with the username equals “blah” cannot use more than 20% of the CPU and X Gigs of Ram. Yes, I saw that working too. So now SQL has “resource pools”.

                Disconnected scenarios without having to rewriting applications.

                Filestream Data Storage. You create a column that is a file, but you store only the file name there. SQL Server stores the file in the file system and maintains the consistency between the relational data and the file.

                You can have up to 100000 columns in a table. And if you do that, you must be a mad dude.

                Filtered indexes: I want to filter this column ONLY if this other column is greater than 56. Woohoo!

                Hierarchical data type.

                DateTime2 data type – higher precision.

                DateTime with offset data type.

                Virtual Earth integration

                Geometry location data type.

                Geography spatial data type.

                Merge T-SQL statement. If you are an Oracle Certified too you already know what that means.

                Data Mining in Excel

                And some details: No 60, 65 or 70 compatibility levels anymore. No pubs or northwind databases installed with SQL Server.

Here are some valuable tips about MOSS and WSS to keep in mind, extracted from the NZ TechEd 2007:

SQL Server:

Databases can get big, really big, if you store lots of documents in SharePoint. Split your databases so they have around 50GB to 100GB. This will make many things easier, such as backup/restore for example.

Don’t update statistics for SharePoint database. Trust that SharePoint will take care of that. If you update statistics, this can actually make things worse.

During the first days, when you probably will be loading lots of documents, you will probably want to set the database recovery mode to simple to improve performance.

Use aliases when configuring database access, this will make a lot easier when moving from one SQL Server to another.

IIS:

                Do not configure IIS, configure SharePoint. Yes, I know, I don’t feel very comfortable with that too, but that’s how SharePoint works, so accept it and be happy.

                Get to know how AAM works, avoid IIS host headers.

                Get to know how Security Zones work, they can be very useful. Remember that you need a security zone with NTLM support in order to allow search.

                If you are used to ASP.Net applications, remember that web.config files work differently here. They stay at InstallDir\InetPub\wwwroot\wss\virtual directories\{GUID of Site}

                If you need your SharePoint to have internet access (read RSS’s for example) you need to change the web.config of each web site that needs this access.

                Application pools for SharePoint takes a lot of RAM (consider at least 1 GB per pool). Avoid creating too many of them. If you are considering having both SharePoint and SQL server on the same box, memory can become a serious issue.

Security:

                Always use domain accounts for all the SharePoint services.

                Create one domain account for each of the following:

                                -Farm account

                                -SSP account

                                -Office SharePoint Search Service

                                -Default content crawling (this one has read access to everything, so shouldn’t be mixed with others)

                                -Standard app pool account

                Do not mix these accounts

Log files:

                Always check SharePoint’s log files after setups/upgrades.

Windows Event Logs:

                Consider using MOM as your central management system, will make things easier

General:

                The first SharePoint Server in a Farm is like the first AD Server in a domain. So that requires more attention when installing/configuring.

                Features: Installing is different than activating

                You have content deployment so you can mirror your authoring server to the production server. It works incrementally by default, and is only for MOSS. But the API that supports it can be used on WSS as well. Do not edit content on the destination server when using this feature.

                You can also copy content using stsadm command line tool, site management tool, backup/restore or custom codes, but if you are replicating an authoring site to production, the content deployment is your guy.

Hotfixes:

                There are known bugs, and hotfixes for them. Remember to check in blogs and MS website.

Staging:

                There is no staging server support for content, only code. Why? Because it wouldn’t make sense. You can create/change your content in production without making it visible.

Semana que vem apresentarei um web cast pela Microsoft sobre o .Net Framework 3, focando em estratégias para uma migração de código sem traumas.

https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032324917&culture=pt-BR.

Dia 11/5/2006 estarei na Usiminas – Ipatinga apresentando uma palestra sobre Visual Studio.Net 2005

Também dia 19/5/2006, às 19:30 farei outra apresentação do mesmo tema: Frameworks de desenvolvimento e .Net na FABRAI

Dia 19/5/2006 às 8:00 estarei na faculdade FABRAI fazendo uma palestra sobre Frameworks de desenvolvimento de sistemas e .Net

Dia 3/5/2006 estarei na PUC Minas no curso de administração apresentando uma aula a convite do prof. Guilherme Menezes sobre mercado de capitais e estratégias de investimentos